I take hold of my light and guide it out towards his light. I feel as it makes contact with Achilles's ethereal. I force my light to join with his, expanding it. I feel along my blade of light and dive into Achilles well. The light feels lost and alone. The sadness from Achilles's light drowns me. It takes me a few minutes to find myself.
I remember what Gandrea showed me and I modify it a little. I move back along my line of light and snip it at the base, I pull my light back into my crown and dive back into the now much larger pool of ought surrounding Achilles. I'm leaving him with a considerably larger well than any normal magi, it will perhaps make him the second most powerful magi in existence currently. But I remembered the tales Gandrea had told me of this mans fighting prowess, the enemies he had killed and the huge victory had won over Asrath and the Darkness, and I can't help myself but give him an extra boost in power, knowing he could be our greatest asset in the war ahead.
Finally, I take a hold of his aura of light and suck it into a small ball, compressing the light until it fit into my hand. I dive back into his well, it was similar to mine, emptiness, one huge burning warrior mark hanging in the void. I push his light into his well. An explosion. Everywhere is lit up. I send my light out in a big arc to surround the well and pull it down until his light is all inside his mark.
I open my eyes. Achilles is on his knees now, his hands held in front of his face. I watched him in the ethereal as he tentatively reached for his light, the surprise on his face and his hands shaking as he felt his light again for the first time in two thousand years. He pulls his light through his body and finally it's in his hand. He throws his right hand in the air and suddenly the room is full of light, a burning powerful light. It takes a moment to die down, Achilles is staring at me now.
"You gave me back my light. I don't know how to repay you." He tells me. I just smile.
"Fight for us, that is all the payment I need Achilles. It will be my honour to fight side by side with the first Lightbringer." I tell him. There are tears in his eyes. I silently seethe, keeping the smile on my face despite how difficult it was becoming. He had his light back, I never would. There would not be another lightbringer coming along with the ability to return my power to me.
The rest are gathering around us now, Katie's arms around my waist and her head against my back. Phil is slapping Achilles on the back. Gray and Melanie are standing side by side holding hands, smiling. Wident is watching, shaking his head, his whole life dedicated to studying the ethereal and never in his wildest dreams did he imagine something like this.
Achilles is still on his knees. I feel him pulling on his light - all of it. Reminding me of the safe house a few months ago. And sure enough, he begins a vow to me.
"I vow to serve the lightbringer, I will fight with, and for, you. I will devote my life the defeating the darkness and only upon my death will my oath be served." his light explodes out and reaches for me. I can feel the honesty and loyalty in him. It shocks me, more so than any of the other people that made a vow to me. This man knew what it was like to live without his light, and still he made the vow, knowing if it was broken he would be without his power once more. His light was sucked back into his well, a look of fear spread across his face for the moment his light was away from him. But he was smiling again now with his power back in his well.
Thomas's heart broke as Achilles smiled. The light was not just an inanimate object, something to be used whenever the need arose. It was a being, a friend. We spend our entire lives growing up with this ancient being inside us, teaching us, guiding us, protecting us - and most of all, supporting us. No matter what, it was always there. And soon it wouldn't be there for me.
"Now, I want to see your sword work!" Phil tells him, another slap on his back. Achilles laughs.
I push down my own emotions and consider the procedure I just performed. I only provided Achilles a boost to his own well, I didn't have to create an entire new one. But I could feel the drain on my light. The price for each use of this gift was the loss of light, the light I gift has to come from somewhere - and currently it is coming directly from my well, every well I gift will cause me to weaken, it wasn't a viable option to create any more magi using my light when it would only leave me weakened for the final battle with the darkness.
"Gandrea, we have a problem." I call over to the old dragon born. Everyone around us is silent, unsure of the problem I was speaking of. But Gandrea was nodding, she knew. She had told me of this cost.
"I know Thomas. I have known this entire time. It is why I set into motion a chain of events that would give us a new source of light for you to draw from." she tells me.
There's a sick feeling in the bottom of my stomach, I remembered pulling the light from Donal, the anguish. And now faced with the possibility of losing my own light I knew I wouldn't be able to forcefully take another magi's power.
"No Thomas, I don't mean steal it from magi. Relax." she could read my line of thought from my expression. I do relax, a little. Mildly confused.
"So where?" I ask her.
She chuckles. "First, let me tell everyone else how your gift works. For Thomas to be able to gift the power of light to people, he must give them light from a source that already exists. His gift to Achilles just now was from his own well. But of course, we can't drain Thomas to create new magi and leave him without power against the darkness. So I created a crafting. A crafting that Thomas now knows how to make. I will let our scholar explain the rest." she finished, pointing towards Wident.
He was taken aback, confusion spreading across his face. It took him a moment to relax, a huge smile breaking out.
"Of course!" he booms, "of course. The vault of souls."
Gandrea is nodding, Gray smiles, but the rest of us are confused.
"The vault of souls is known only by sanctuary commanders and fifth level scholars. When a magi reaches a certain age, he is taken into the vault. The vault is a small room filled with small glass jars. These jars are imbued with castings that none of us understood - until now. The magi taken into the vault send their light into these jars, the jars are then closed; containing the light."
I'm a little surprised to hear this, I had never heard of anything like this. But it makes sense, I had seen the crafting in Gandrea's mind, I had even added the casting to my own crafting and I'm already storing light within it.
I go back over to the fire, warming my hands for a moment. There's a vault containing the wells of who knows how many magi. It could provide me a source of light that would allow me to create an army of magi. A new crafting that will allow me to create a very different army. Two dragons. Two dragon born. A master swords man. A two-thousand-year-old warrior of unmatched skill. Two magi warriors of exceptional casting power. A scholar that knows everything, apparently.
I smiled to myself as I thought about all of this. A spark of hope deep inside me, growing and spreading. Maybe we had a chance after all.
I sit down on the two seater and nod at Katie to come over. She sits next to me and leans against me. I kiss her.
"I love you." I tell her.
"I love you too." she tells me through a kiss.
"Aww, okay love birds, let's get back to this vault of souls. How many Wident?" Phil mocks us before turning to the scholar.
"I haven't been there for over a year, when I was last there... Hmm. There were seven." He tells us.
"Seven? Just seven wells? What will that achieve?" Gray asks suspiciously, unsure of how seven wells would help us. And I agreed with him, learning there were just seven...
"No. Seven full jars. Each jar holds the light of ten. Ten magi to a jar. Seventy wells worth of light is being stored in the vault. But that's not our only access to light. Thomas, you can draw from your surroundings." Wident finishes, looking at me again.
Seventy! Seventy new magi. But I stop that line of thought right there. Seventy new magi of normal magi level ability wouldn't be very effective. No, I needed to combine this with my
other plan.
And then the ending of his sentence jolted me. My surroundings. I had learned to pull light from my surroundings, he was right. But it wasn't a path I was willing to follow.
"No, I won’t do that. I won’t kill animals just for their light, and if I only take a small amount and leave them alive it would take me months to gain enough power to gift a single well." I tell Wident.
He nods. I know he didn't mean it like that, he has another plan. But it can wait, it's dinner time now. Melanie is cooking - much to everyone's joy. Her food is by far the best of the groups. We all make small talk while we wait, but it's mostly Achilles telling us stories.
He's lived for a very long time. During the battle with the darkness, Achilles had to use his entire well to defeat it. The huge blast of light he had summoned had left his light outside of his well and just out of reach of his ethereal.
He had gone on to live human life after human life. He had been there for the rise of the Greeks, the fall of Troy and finally the rise of Rome. He had witnessed the creation of the pyramids, the charge of the Mongolians. He had seen the civil war in the US, watched on as the Irish rebelled against the British. He had been in the war council of Churchill during World War II. And his latest life had been spent as a car salesman here in Mesa, Arizona.
We listen, amazed, as he tells his stories. Dinner is served shortly after, vegetable and steak stew. It's delicious, seasoned perfectly.
"Melanie, please teach Katie how to cook like this." I call over to her, grinning. She laughs. Katie punches me in the side.
"Oomph." as air explodes out of me, leaving me winded. I pull her in and kiss her.
I look over to Melanie over Katie's head, mocking a super serious look and nodding quickly. Katie pokes me again and everyone bursts out laughing.
We spend the rest of dinner joking and laughing with each other, even Achilles joins in.
After dinner, we go back to the comfortable chairs resting in front of the fire. I watch Gandrea as she piles the logs up in the fireplace, Thor then breaths into them and the fire is lit, warming us.
"Wident, you had a plan?" I ask. A quick short nod, he takes a moment to think, his hand brushing through his new grey beard. He was getting used to that thing.
"You can pull light from your surroundings. Bert taught you how to pulse, right? Spread your light to your surroundings. What range did you have?" Wident asks me.
"Ten miles." I tell him. Gray gasps. Bert was also very surprised when I had finally reached ten miles. "So far. Every pulse I can push further." I finish.
"Incredible. Anyway, you tested your theory of absorbing light from small animals, correct?" I nod, "excellent. What if I had a way for you to pull in even more light than you could from the store of seventy magi's wells?" He finishes the question slowly, teasingly.
I try to think of what he could mean, hoping to guess it before he tells us. But he has no intention of telling us yet. He wants us to stew.
I think of every possibility, but none of it adds up. What could hold that much light? Even the... my though trails off.
I jump to my feet.
"Of course!" I yell accidentally, excited. But my excitement dies quickly. No. I can't do that.
"No. I won't. The Coliseum has stood for fifteen hundred years. " I tell him.
The Coliseum is a magi arena, the gateway for it is through the coliseum in Rome, a nice touch. Every year a tournament is held there to determine the strongest of magi. The winner gets a special title and rank, and the glory and honour that comes with it. There hadn't been an Imperator for over seventy years. The tournament isn't just about defeating your opponent, it was a whole lot more than that. And for that reason, we haven't seen a winner for a very long time.
"I thought you would say that. But it's an option. A final resort if all else fails and you're desperate, you always have a portal to the Coliseum available to you." Wident tells me, his face serious now.
I nod. "A final resort." One I hope to never have to use. Wident's plan is for me to draw the light from the Coliseum. It is a light enforced building. Every year at the tournament, before a magi could enter either as a contestant or spectator, they had to use some of their own light to strengthen the Coliseum, this would prevent it from being destroyed by any of the magical duels being battled inside. A tradition that has been followed since its creation. Fifteen hundred years of strengthening by light, the power held within those walls would be enormous.
But it is a huge part of our history, and the thought of destroying it doesn't sit well with me.
"Okay guys. It's time to get some rest, tomorrow we head back to the safe house and see what Bert has managed to bring together while we've been gone."
With those final words, I take Katie's hand and we head to the room. Thin curls away from her and goes over to the fire, lying on the rug next to Thor. Katie smiles at me.
Thirty-Four – In the Night
Darkness
The darkness could feel a new power in the world. A power it knew well. It had felt a huge shift in the ethereal and it knew. It had sent a small wave of darkness out into the ethereal, it had taken a few minutes. In the time it took, the darkness had considered so many different possibilities. But it kept being drawn back to the most worrisome. A true lightbringer.
And its fear was confirmed as a picture presented itself. A reaching of the light, a flash and a pulse. A new light flared, an old light. A light that had caused the darkness so many problems once before. A light that had been used to banish it to its prison of light.
The lightbringer had learned how to gift and connect light to an existing well, an interesting development. The darkness worried. The darkness worried that a source of light existed that would allow the lightbringer to create new magi to combat its forces. But the darkness also hoped. Hoped that the lightbringer knew nothing of his new power, hoped that the lightbringer would gift too much light, weaken himself. Easy prey for the darkness and its forces.
But the darkness did not hope too much, it had once placed its hope in a falsity and had paid a heavy price for its negligence. So the darkness hoped, but in its mind it planned.
The darkness was furious. It had watched as its army had been destroyed, the arrival of the dragon and its master. Flame had washed through its army unchecked and it remembered the first great battle. There were more dragons then, bigger, stronger. They had destroyed millions of the darkness's forces. And now a dragon had returned. But not just one, two. Of opposite sexes. The darkness had felt the rise and summoning of the second dragon just hours after the arrival of the first. No coincidence.
Forces were aligning against the darkness. And now. The return of the undying warrior, the first of the lightbringers. Achilles.
The darkness threw a blast of darkness into the air. "Asrath!".
It took a few minutes, the wave of nothingness exploding out into the sanctuary.
Asrath stormed in through the large wooden doors, entering the long thin hall and making his way to the throne where the true form of the darkness now sat.
"My lord." he said as he approached, "you called?"
"Yes Asrath. Yes. Your friend has returned to the living, his access to the light is restored." the darkness voice booming from the walls, with no mouth to echo the sound of speech.
"Achilles is back." the last words echoing over and over, fading eerily into the background.
A look came over Asrath's face, the darkness could not place it. But it made the darkness worry. First Asrath abandoned the battle, feigning a vision, and now this? The darkness fumed.
"Go now Asrath, I want Achilles dead. I want his body annihilated."
Asrath nodded. "Yes, my lord."
Asrath made his way slowly out of the throne room, the darkness watching him suspiciously.
The darkness could not help but go back to the lightbringer and his newly acquired ability to gift light. The darkness knew there were huge pools of light out there, waiting to be tapped. It
could feel the light seeping through the ethereal. There was one in this very city, or under it, the darkness was unsure and unable to pinpoint its exact location. It could feel another, in a place called Italy, a city called Rome. An old city. And one more, deep inside a forest in a smaller country, quite close by, a place called Ireland.
If Thomas managed to gather light from one of these places he would become a threat, the darkness could not allow this. It decided to pay another visit to the prisoner.
It moved through the sanctuary, a winding corridor leading to a staircase down into the cellar. It took the stairs two at a time, passing by the cells as it marched to the final corner.
The darkness turned the corner and stopped. The prisoner. Was gone. Gone. The darkness raged. All around it stone exploded. Screams from above as people perished in clouds of the void. Its scream reaching out into the ethereal and flicking out at the consciousness’s of magi all around it. And all around it the magi winked out of existence.
The Darkest Light: Book 1 of The Inferno Prophecy Page 16
